Smart Work: How to Increase Productivity, Achieve Balance and Reduce Stress

✍ Scribed by Dermot Crowley

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 246
• Edition: 2
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Organise your way to renewed focus and calm

Smart Work: How to Increase Productivity, Achieve Balance and Reduce Stress is the busy professional's guide to getting organised in the digital workplace. Are you drowning in constant emails, phone calls, paperwork, interruptions and meeting actions? This book throws you a lifeline. Whether your workforce is in person, hybrid, or remote, Smart Work shows you how to take advantage of your digital tools to reprioritise, refocus and get back to doing what’s important. You may already have the latest technology, but if you're still swamped, you're not using it to your advantage. This useful guide shows you how to centralise and organise your workflow for better outcomes. With Smart Work, you'll develop a simple and sustainable productivity system to manage your inputs and realise your goals.

Like most professionals, you want to do great work and achieve great things. But when half your day is spent on emails, phone calls and 'extra' duties, you rarely get a chance to shine. This book changes that. Get back in control so you can start performing like a star.

• Get organised, focused and proactive
• Conquer the daily incoming deluge
• Spend more time on the important work
• Leverage your desktop and mobile technology
• Optimise your tools for remote and hybrid work

When work is coming at you from every direction, it's difficult to focus and prioritise. Things get lost in the shuffle. But when you channel everything into a single stream, you settle into a flow and get more done in less time. Smart Work is your guide to finding your flow―and the bottom of your inbox.

This book is part of the Smart Productivity series, helping readers find practical solutions for better managing their time, energy and focus.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
About the author
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
Productivity in the 21st century
The Smart Work system at a glance
The practices that drive productivity
The Smart Work roadmap — nine productivity skills
Actions
Inputs
Outcomes
Processing, planning and prioritising
A note on technology
Personal productivity tools
Team productivity tools
Mobile productivity tools
Part I Centralise Your Actions
Chapter 1 Consolidateyour work
Meetings vs tasks
Meeting tools — the shift from paper to electronic
Task tools — stuck in the 20th century
Centralise absolutely every action
Consider — Capture — Commit
1. Consider
2. Capture
3. Commit
Types of actions — hard to soft
Undated task lists
Loosely scheduled tasks
Date-specific priorities
Blocked-out time
Meetings
Zoom in, zoom out
Use undated task lists
Outlook undated tasks
OneNote
Paper notepad
Capture mind clutter
Chapter 2 Schedule it forward
Reactive zone 1 — the first minute
Reactive zone 2 — the last minute
Decide when and schedule
Plan your time using a weekly workflow
Use action horizons
Focus on the start
Balance your workload
Don’t dilute your task list
Next steps only, please
Track it back
Information at your fingertips
This seems like hard work
Chapter 3 Focus your day
Start each day with a daily PASS
Highlight the critical work
Manage the change
Update the progress
Filtering
Scheduling
Ranking
Part II Organise Your Inputs
Chapter 4 Reduce the noise
Reduce email noise
Actionable emails
Informational emails
Questionable emails
Turn off the alerts
Check email proactively
Batch information emails
Delete decisively
Tell them to SSSH
Send a timely acknowledgement
Set an expectation
Schedule an action
Hold yourself accountable
Reduce the disruption of interruption
Chapter 5 Keep it simple
Simplify your filing system
Complex filing systems
Condensed filing systems
Compact filing systems
Deciding if folders are needed
Learn to search
Search techniques
Basic search
Refined searching
Make important emails easier to find
Use a dedicated folder
Rewrite the subject line
Categorise the email
Take the pain out of archiving
File on the run
Chapter 6 Process to empty
Treat your inbox like your letterbox
Clear the backlog quickly — the Mount Rushmore technique
Schedule email actions
Be decisive
Process all your inputs
Inbox
Paper in-tray
Voicemail
MS Teams posts
Meeting notepad
Part III Realise Your Outcomes
Chapter 7 Identify your value
Clarify your critical roles
Reconnect frequently
Chapter 8 Make time to plan
Build planning time into your schedule
Monthly planning
The Good, the Bad and the Great
Weekly ROAR planning
Review
Organise
Anticipate
Realign
Chapter 9 Fight for importance
Make it visible
Watch out for the procrastination pixie
Blocking strategies
Delegate early and well
Why delegate?
What to delegate?
When to delegate?
Who to delegate to?
How to delegate the work?
The delegation matrix
Next steps
The learning phase
The set-upphase
The practice phase
The mastery phase
Index
EULA